


Siren Song

by lostboywriting



Category: Subarashiki Kono Sekai | The World Ends With You
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon, Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-13
Updated: 2019-08-13
Packaged: 2020-08-23 05:03:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20237185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lostboywriting/pseuds/lostboywriting
Summary: Sho can hear the music the city should be playing.





	Siren Song

**Author's Note:**

  * For [draconicsockpuppet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/draconicsockpuppet/gifts).

> Prompt for this was Clint Mansell's "2πr."

Sho can hear the composition he would make the city play, if it were his—no, what he _will_ make the city play, when it is. Fast, complex drumbeats, layered over with random notes and unexpected key changes—random in the true mathematical sense, not the colloquial one. Patternless as a whole, but containing all possible patterns of finite length if you search for long enough. The old infinite-monkeys-at-keyboards thing, but instead of Hamlet they're playing electronica with a side order of shrieking sirens. 

(Although Hamlet will be in there too, somewhere, in all possible variations and translations—broken into its characters and converted into binary and fed through whatever algorithm he decides to go with for translating zeroes and ones into music.

"You sure about that?" the barista says, pouring him out another cup of coffee. "Some people would say if your music contains _everything,_ it might as well contain nothing. What do you say to that?"

"That's the point," Sho says, and then amends this to: "One of the points. People will find whatever they want in there anyway, so put everything in there for them to find, and they'll all be equally meaningless. Art and a commentary on its consumption, all in one.")

He can hear it singing to him, everything the city _should_ be, as he twists together frayed wires and misshapen metal to make his latest sculpture. Sharp edges and clashing keys and complexity that builds on itself like a fractal as it goes. 

(The barista chuckles appreciatively. Sho can't remember the guy's name—didn't bother to listen when he said it, and he hasn't got a nametag—but he'll grant he's easier to talk to than most of the digits in this city. "Decent trick if you can pull it off." There's something like a dare in his eyes. "Can you, though? Most of us are finite creatures."

"I'm working on it." The coffee's bitter black going down. "There's a couple obstacles.")

What it is now is—dull. Tame, its chaos the entirely predictable kind, and Sho _hates_ predictable. The wires wind up and through a heap of trash, coiling around old pieces of machinery now obsolete. Out of date, clinging to things they should discard, repeating the same cycles over and over.

("Obstacles, huh?" The barista takes his glasses off, squints like a thoughtful cat as he polishes them on his shirt. "You wanna tell me about those obstacles? You never know. Sometimes you find help in the unlikeliest places.")

In Sho's hands, the wires at the top of the heap become the remnants of a figure: broken and distorted, the frayed ends splayed out like fractured wings just before it starts to fall. Every siren in the city can scream, but there'll be no help for someone when they've plummeted from that height.

He steps back and studies the thing for a moment, and grins in satisfaction.

Then he turns away, and pulls the gun out of his pocket, and with the drums accelerating in his head he goes to hunt a Composer.


End file.
